Category: commentary

The WPX CW 2008 results were submitted to CQ about 2 weeks ago.  The CQ art department and editorial staff did a wonderful job of squeezing in some great photos, top score boxes, a record number of club scores, and almost 8 full pages of score listings.  Look for the March issue of CQ Magazine in your mailbox in 4-6 weeks.

This completes my first cycle through the management of the WPX Contest.  It has been very interesting and a lot of organizational work has been done.  Things should be easier the second time around, which will allow more time for promoting the contest and for even more in depth log checking.

Thanks to everyone who operated or supported the WPX contest in 2008.  Looking forward to even more activity and record scores in 2009!

As part of the ongoing effort to automate the log checking process for the CQ WPX Contest, one of the big issues has been the variety of club names, spellings, and abbreviations that appear in the Cabrillo files. It literally takes hours to try to go through the listings and do the research to assign each log to the correct club.

There are two things that would greatly simplify this part of the process:

• Entrants would spell out their complete club name (no acronyms)
• Club names would be spelled out in a consistent way

To encourage this help from contest entrants, I have begun development of an “official” list of contest club names. You can view the list at http://www.cqwpx.com/clubnames.htm

Please take a moment to find your club on the list and let me know if there are any errors or there is a more accepted spelling of the club name. The goal is to have the names on the list be what the club members want to use in their log and how they want the club name to appear in the magazine results.

To further encourage the use of the full club names, the log submission robot will start comparing the club names to those on this list. If a match is not found, the submitter will receive a warning message in the acknolwedgement email. We are hoping this will remind people to help us by resubmitting with the correct name.

No log will be rejected if the club name does not match. There are hundreds of clubs around the world that may not be on the list and we welcome club score submissions from any of them. The official list is for those clubs that expect to submit 3 or more entries to the contest and be eligible for inclusion in the magazine results. 

The one exception that will not be handled by the club list is for multi-op entries that want to apply their score to more than one club.  In these cases, please indicate the club names and percentage of the score that should go to each club.  You will receive the warning message, but don’t worry, we will manually handle these few logs when we compile the final club scores.  Remember, only multi-op entries can apply their score to more than one club based on the club membership of the operators that participated. 

I am happy to report the WPX Phone results and writeup have been sent off to CQ Magazine.  It is quite a job to pull all the different boxes, tables, photos (with captions), soapbox, scores, and writeup into files with the proper format.  And without introducing too many errors during the process!

The Phone results will appear in the January 2009 issue of CQ Magazine.  That should go into the mail just before Christmas.

Now time to take off a few weeks and enter some contests.  Will finish the log checking and results for the CW contest during December.